More Thanksgiving travelers driving to save money

Feeling the pinch of the sluggish economic recovery, many Americans setting out on the nation’s annual Thanksgiving migration sacrificed summer vacations, relied on relatives for airfare or scoured the Web for travel deals to ensure they made it home.

It’s not just tight family finances making travel tough. Airlines struggling to save on jet fuel and other expenses have cut the number of flights, leading to a jump in airfares. Those hitting the roads face high gas prices and rising tolls. Now, with talk of the nation sliding off a “fiscal cliff” come January, many travelers said they’re accepting that sacrifices for pricy holiday journeys have become the norm.

“You become immune to it, I guess,” said Chris Zukowski, a 43-year-old locomotive engineer from the Chicago suburb of Huntley, as he hugged his wife and three children goodbye at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and lamented he could not afford to join them on the holiday trip to New Jersey.

“You have to cut back on things just to make sure that you can afford to do stuff like this, so they can go visit grandma,” he said, referring to his son and two daughters.

If the nation’s travel patterns are any kind of barometer for the state of the economy, the travel forecast for Thanksgiving week suggested a slight upward nudge as people and businesses recover slowly from the 2007-09 recession in which Americans lost nearly a quarter of their wealth.

About 43.6 million Americans were expected to journey 50 miles or more between Wednesday and Sunday, just a 0.7 percent increase from last year, according to AAA’s yearly Thanksgiving travel analysis. After a couple of years of healthy post-recession growth, this year’s numbers suggest it will take a stronger economy to lift travel demand significantly, the travel organization said.

More people are driving, fewer are flying and the average distance traveled was expected to be nearly 17 percent — or about 120 miles — shorter than a year ago, it said.

As car ownership declines among younger Americans, many of those hitting the road were jumping onto buses.

She was setting off on a 235-mile bus trip to Fargo, N.D. From there, her parents planned to drive her the rest of the way to a family gathering in Grand Forks.

Army Pfc. Jordan Clark, of Biloxi, Miss., said he was only able to fly because relatives pooled their resources to buy his ticket.

“It’s been difficult. My parents help out, my grandparents,” the 20-year-old serviceman said before getting on a flight from Chicago to San Antonio. He wasn’t so lucky over the summer, when he had to make the same journey by bus in what became a three-day ordeal thanks to breakdowns. But it saved him more than $200.

Aided by smartphone apps, social media and other technology, consumers are getting better at sniffing out deals and realize they need to be flexible with dates and even with which airports they chose when booking, said Courtney Scott, a senior editor at Travelocity.